In a letter to the Senate banking committee, Bernanke released a staff memo that rebuts the portrayals in recent Bloomberg and other news articles that the Fed was aiming to help big banks’ profits at the expense of taxpayers. (Read the letter)

A Bloomberg Markets Magazine article released Nov. 27 said that big banks reaped an estimated $13 billion of income after the Fed committed $7.7 trillion in funds as of March 2009 to rescuing the financial system. ...

Calling the lending numbers in the media “wildly inaccurate,” the Fed said total credit outstanding under its liquidity programs was never more than the $1.5 trillion peak reached in December 2008. ...

The Fed said that nearly all of the emergency assistance has been fully repaid or is on track to be, something it said wasn’t stressed in news articles. The central bank claimed that the loans benefited American taxpayers by generating an estimated $20 billion in interest income for the U.S. Treasury. ...

When you contribute equity capital, and when things turn out well, you deserve an equity return. When you don't take equity--when you accept the risks but give the return to somebody else--you aren't acting as a good agent for your principals, the taxpayers.

Thus I do not understand why officials from the Fed and the Treasury keep telling me that the U.S. couldn't or shouldn't have profited immensely from its TARP and other loans to banks. Somebody owns that equity value right now. It's not the government. But when the chips were down it was the government that bore the risk. That's what a lender of last resort does.

That's why Bagehot's rule is to lend freely but at a penalty rate. The bankers should not profit from the fact that they were over leveraged, and compelled the government to act as a lender of last resort.

Update: I should add that I am not questioning the Fed's role as a lender of last resort, only how the gains from fulfilling that function are divvied up.

In a letter to the Senate banking committee, Bernanke released a staff memo that rebuts the portrayals in recent Bloomberg and other news articles that the Fed was aiming to help big banks’ profits at the expense of taxpayers. (Read the letter)

A Bloomberg Markets Magazine article released Nov. 27 said that big banks reaped an estimated $13 billion of income after the Fed committed $7.7 trillion in funds as of March 2009 to rescuing the financial system. ...

Calling the lending numbers in the media “wildly inaccurate,” the Fed said total credit outstanding under its liquidity programs was never more than the $1.5 trillion peak reached in December 2008. ...

The Fed said that nearly all of the emergency assistance has been fully repaid or is on track to be, something it said wasn’t stressed in news articles. The central bank claimed that the loans benefited American taxpayers by generating an estimated $20 billion in interest income for the U.S. Treasury. ...

When you contribute equity capital, and when things turn out well, you deserve an equity return. When you don't take equity--when you accept the risks but give the return to somebody else--you aren't acting as a good agent for your principals, the taxpayers.

Thus I do not understand why officials from the Fed and the Treasury keep telling me that the U.S. couldn't or shouldn't have profited immensely from its TARP and other loans to banks. Somebody owns that equity value right now. It's not the government. But when the chips were down it was the government that bore the risk. That's what a lender of last resort does.

That's why Bagehot's rule is to lend freely but at a penalty rate. The bankers should not profit from the fact that they were over leveraged, and compelled the government to act as a lender of last resort.

Update: I should add that I am not questioning the Fed's role as a lender of last resort, only how the gains from fulfilling that function are divvied up.